How to calculate the time needed to read a book - The Happy Android

If you are a fan of reading, surely at some point you will have how long it could take you read a certain book, ebook or novel. This is a piece of information that can come in handy to plan our reading moments, but also to be able to have a realistic perspective of the number of books that we should buy or download per month (assuming that we really want to read them all at some point).

Reading lenth is a web application that is responsible for performing this calculation for us, and the truth is that it is the most accurate. In essence, it is a search engine where we must enter the name of the book, and once located, the system tells us how many hours of reading it will take us to finish it.

The system takes the Amazon book catalog as a database, so unless it is a very rare title, the search engine will most likely be able to satisfy our demands without too much trouble. There are a lot of books in Spanish, but also in English, French and other languages.

What formula is used to calculate the reading time of a book?

Reading Lenght uses a fairly ingenious technique - and logical, on the other hand - to obtain the number of hours necessary to read a work. The first thing it does is make an estimate of the number of words that the book contains, and for this it is based on the duration of the audiobook (if it exists) or in the number of pages in the novel.

Once you have the total number of words, divide that number by 250, which is the number of words per minute that an adult can read on average. From here, the system again divide the result by 60, now achieving the total number of hours needed to read all the words that make up the book.

The good thing about this application is that if we have a faster reading rate or are a little slower, the system also lets us adjust the number of words per minute. Thus, if we are able to read 180 words per minute, for example, we can reset the counter and obtain a much more accurate result.